• Every semester I assign my students some variety of an exercise on writing dialogue and scene. Often they ask for sample scenarios to help get them started. I borrowed this one, years ago, from Josip Novakovich: Write a probing dialogue between a police officer and a burglar who pretends to live in the apartment from which he’s stealing. I mixed it in with a few others, some cribbed from teaching texts, others of my own devising. To my surprise, the vast majority of the class picked the cop/burglar scene to write. So did the next class. And the next one. And so on, with mixed results, until I quit using it. I included this particular scenario to allow for some room for comedy, but it always struck me as too ridiculous to generate anything of substance. Anyway, I decided, at last, to have a go at it myself. The final draft of “Smash and Grab” veers pretty far from the original source, but it does prove that my students are right about most things and I’m usually well served if I shut up and pay attention.
Richard Lange’s stories have appeared in the Sun, the Southern Review, the Iowa Review, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles and is currently working on a novel.
• Things weren’t going so well for me when I wrote “Bank of America.” I was angry and broke. I had a bad job and felt humiliated everyday. I began to fantasize about ways out of my situation, and, living in the bank robbery capital of the world and all, those fantasies look on criminal overtones. The first drafts of this piece were too full of fire and ranting. I had to step back and let the characters do their stuff. It was a good lesson in corralling raw emotion. I’m doing okay now. I got a new job, a better one; I quit smoking. But I’m still angry.
It’s important that I thank Marie Hayes and the other good people at StoryQuarterly for originally printing this piece. Without them, I wouldn’t be here.
Tom Larsen lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, with his wife, Andree, and Langley the cat. His work has appeared in Newsday, Cottonwood, Mixed Bag, and Christopher Street Magazine. “Lids” first appeared in New Millennium Writing in the spring of 2003. “Straight Life,” his latest story, is included in the current issue of New Millennium Writing, and his short story “What’s Marvin Gave Got to Do with It?” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Lynx Eye magazine in Los Angeles.
• I first got the idea for “Lids” while living in an apartment in the Berkeley flatlands. The tenant next door ran a small-time drug operation and his customers included several local rockers who were poised on, but would never quite topple over, the brink of stardom. Mike, the tenant, never slept and rarely left the apartment. Traffic was horrendous and I was initially torn between calling the cops and stealing his stash. I settled, instead, on becoming his most reliable customer.
The character “Lids” came from thirty years of watching Robert Mitchum movies.
The location is an amalgam of every place I have ever lived.
The rest I made up.
New Orleans-born Dick Lochte worked for a detective agency, managed a travel company, and promoted and wrote film reviews for a world-famous magazine for men before moving to southern California and a career as a journalist, screenwriter, and author. His first novel, Sleeping Dog, a New York Times Notable Book, was nominated for the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Anthony Awards and won the Nero Wolfe Award. Lochte is the author of a short story collection, Lиску Dog, and eight novels, the most recent being the legal thriller Lawless, written with attorney Christopher Darden.
• It was inevitable that I write a story about bank robbers. Not only do I live in what the FBI considers to be the bank robbery capital of the world, I was able to do my research for “Low Tide” at the dinner table. My wife is the president of a nationwide organization of licensed psychologists specializing in caring for the victims of workplace trauma. The trauma is usually the result of bank robberies. My robber, who’d probably be nicknamed the Movie Star Bandit, is a direct descendant of a long line of genuine perps such as the Yankee Bandit, the Plaid Shirt Bandit, and (because he carried his gun in his tummy-pack) the Kangaroo Bandit. The other characters — bank employees, customers, lawmen, et al. — are pure fiction. As are the details of the robber’s modus operandi, which, readers with larceny in their hearts should note, may not work as smoothly in real life.
Richard A. Lupoff has written more than fifty books spanning the worlds of crime, science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction. He is best known in the mystery field for his eight-volume are of novels about insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and homicide detective Marvia Plum. The series stalled, unfortunately, after seven entries, but Lupoff has sworn to complete the as-yet fragmentary eighth volume in the pretty-near future.
• When I was a schoolboy we were taught history as a memorization exercise: the names of kings, generals, politicians, and inventors; the dates of battles and elections. Such dry stuff was horribly boring and turned me away from history for many years. Then I discovered, chiefly through observing the world around me, that history is, in fact, a story, and a fascinating one. This realization has informed my novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction.
Writers of crime, suspense, and mystery are best described as haunted by the genre, and Joyce Carol Oates is one of these. Born and raised in upstate New York, she received degrees at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin, and has been a professor of humanities at Princeton University since 1978. She is a recipient of the National Book Award and, in 2003, the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Achievement in Literature. She is the author most recently of the novella Rape: A Love Story and I Am No One You Know, a collection of short stories on crime-related themes.
• “Dolclass="underline" A Romance of the Mississippi” is about a subject that has always fascinated me: the conjunction of the familial and the murderous. That individuals who are devoted to blood relatives can be utterly heartless to nonrelatives; that individuals whom we might find attractive, even charismatic, if encountered in the right circumstances, can be monstrous in other circumstances where to encounter them would be lethal.
In what we call real life, as distinct from fiction, there are very few girls like Doll Early, who prey upon sexual predators. Young girls exploiter! in the flourishing sex trade are not likely to be empowered to avenge themselves upon their clients. But “Dolclass="underline" A Romance of the Mississippi” is a romance, and Doll and her father, Mr. Early, are figures of romance. I meant them to have an American mythic aura, outlaws who in another era might be the subjects of ballad.
Jack O’Connell is the author of the novels Box Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace, and Word Made Flesh. He lives with his wife and children in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he is currently at work on a new “Quinsigamond” book.
• In general, and from the start, I’ve preferred the long form. But every now and then, a notion for a short story arrives unexpectedly anti pecks away at me until I heed it. “The Swag from Doc Hawthorne’s” is a good example of this occasional ambush. The story began with an image from my misspent youth: I once lasted a week doing Darcey’s job — driving a shuttle van from early morning until late afternoon around the same brief and circular route of a research institute. Such employment will breed stories or psychosis. In this instance, I bloomed a story about impossible stories. And though the future looks ambiguous, at best, for our two ill-suited partners in crime, I’m not at all convinced we’ve seen the last of Yuk Tang and Darcey.